Watch a Russian Tank Battalion in Full Attack Mode

Here's a video clip of an entire battalion of Russian T-80U main battle tanks in a live-fire exercise. The clip is short on details but the exercise appears to take place somewhere in western Russia.

A typical Russian tank battalion has 31 tanks—3 companies of 10 tanks each, plus the battalion commander's tank. The clip appears to show the entire battalion in action.

The tanks, advancing in line formation, are spread out horizontally. This minimizes the effect of enemy artillery, widens the frontage of the attack, and allows the tank column to more easily identify and engage targets in front of the battalion.

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The T-80U is an older tank and a mainstay of the Russian Ground Forces. The tank has a 125-millimeter main gun, 12.7-millimeter anti-aircraft machine gun, and a 7.62-millimeter machine gun. In addition to tank rounds, it can also fire the Cobra laser-guided missile to ranges of up to 3.1 miles—with a 70 percent hit probability.

The tank has a crew of three: tank commander, gunner, and driver. The automatic loader, while reliable, is slower than a human loader and takes between 7 and 19 seconds to reload, which is why you never see the same tank fire twice. At 46 tons the tank is lighter than the 70 ton M-1A2 Abrams, but armor protection is inferior to the American tank.

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A second view early in the clip shows the gun firing from the tank commander's open hatch, and a third view later in the clip shows the tank commander looking through his armored hatch, observing the battle.

As the tanks advance a single 9K35 Strela-10 (NATO nickname: "Gopher") is seen trailing the rest of the battalion. A short-range mobile air defense system, the Gopher is there to destroy defending enemy anti-tank helicopters and aircraft.